Advocates: Nursing home bill would raise standards

CHICAGO 
Illinois nursing homes would be safer and care would improve under legislation headed to Gov. Pat Quinn for his signature, legislators and advocates say.

The bill, approved by the Senate on Friday after passing the House a day earlier, would require many nursing homes to hire more staff members to care for residents. To increase oversight, the state's health department would also hire more inspectors - as many as 180 new inspectors by 2013, more than doubling their current ranks. Quinn was expected to sign the legislation.

Fines on nursing homes that endanger residents would rise. And the bill would double the licensing fees paid annually by nursing homes, setting them at just under $2,000 a year.

The reforms, which would affect all the state's approximately 800 nursing homes, are aimed at a pattern of violence in Illinois nursing homes stemming from the state's long reliance on the facilities to house younger adults with serious mental illness.

"These stronger provisions would help protect the most vulnerable adults in these facilities from people whose criminal histories make them a risk to others in the homes," said Natalie Bauer, spokeswoman for the state attorney general's office.

Hospitals would have to initiate criminal background checks before transferring some patients into nursing homes. And anyone identified as a sex offender - or as having been convicted of other serious crimes - would then be required to submit to a fingerprint check.

An expanded fingerprint criminal background check would operate as a pilot program in Cook and Will counties. In those places, all younger residents of facilities with both elderly residents and more than 25 residents diagnosed with serious mental illness would get extensive criminal background checks.

Nursing homes would also find it more difficult to subdue residents inappropriately with psychotropic drugs. Before getting such medication, residents or their representatives would have to give their written consent and listen to a discussion of the risks and benefits of the drugs.

The proposals follow a governor's task force initiated after a series of news articles about assaults, rapes and murders at nursing homes.

The reforms also would increase the required staffing from 2.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day to 3.8 hours of nursing care each day in 2014. That's a great improvement, said David Vinkler of AARP.

"You're going to see people getting a lot more care as time goes on, particularly in the poorer performing nursing homes," Vinkler said. An analysis of federal data by the Chicago Reporter found Illinois' for-profit nursing homes had the lowest average staffing level in the nation.

One union leader called the reforms long overdue. "Frontline caregivers will be able to give nursing home residents the care and attention they need, which will mean a better quality of life for all residents," said SEIU Healthcare Illinois President Keith Kelleher.

Arrie Jones of Chicago's Community Renewal Society and an elder at Pullman Presbyterian Church said she visits people in nursing homes and has seen incapacitated residents go hungry and unfed, even with trays of food in front of them, because of inadequate staffing.

"We didn't get a perfect bill. But increased staffing is important," Jones said.